What seemed to be either fruits or flowers, pied
with a thousand hues lustrous and ever varying, bubbled from the
crowns of this fairy foliage. No hills, no lakes, no rivers, no
forms animate or inanimate were to be seen, save those vast auroral
copses that floated serenely in the luminous stillness, with leaves
and fruits and flowers gleaming with unknown fires, unrealizable by
mere imagination.
How strange, I thought, that this sphere should be thus condemned to
solitude! I had hoped, at least, to discover some new form of animal
life,--perhaps of a lower class than any with which we are at
present acquainted,--but still, some living organism. I find my
newly discovered world, if I may so speak, a beautiful chromatic
desert.
While I was speculating on the singular arrangements of the internal
economy of Nature, with which she so frequently splinters into atoms
our most compact theories, I thought I beheld a form moving slowly
through the glades of one of the prismatic forests. I looked more at
tentively, and found that I was not mistaken. Words cannot depict
the anxiety with which I awaited the nearer approach of this
mysterious object. Was it merely some inanimate substance, held in
suspense in the attenuated atmosphere of the globule? or was it an
animal endowed with vitality and motion? It approached, flitting
behind the gauzy, colored veils of cloud-foliage, for seconds dimly
revealed, then vanishing.
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